20 Types of Orgasms Explained: How to Enhance Female Pleasure | Ep 52

Introduction to the Libido Lounge

Dr. Diane: Welcome to the Libido Lounge where we focus on all things love, lust, and libido. We believe that fabulous sex is as important to health as exercise and good food. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode on the Lounge! I’m so excited to bring on Susan Bratton, intimacy expert to millions. Susan and I have had the fortune of meeting each other a couple times on summits, I got to spend New Year’s with her, and we have the best episode for you guys today. We’re going to talk about difficulty orgasming, how we can overcome this, really how we can focus more and more on our pleasure, the differences between women and men, and so much more. So welcome Susan, so happy to have this conversation with you!

Susan Bratton: Oh, it’s so nice to see you again, Dr. Diane. We’ve been friends for quite a few years now and done quite a few things together. I think I met you first by doing a book blurb for you.

Dr. Diane: You did, that was the first thing. I was introduced to you to write the back commentary on my book, you sent it to your daughter, and then we’ve been bouncing around, seeing each other since. So fun, I love it. Good to see you again.

Susan’s Journey with Orgasms

A Lifelong Passion for Pleasure

Susan Bratton: I’m glad that you want to talk about orgasm because, you know, I would say that if there’s anything that I have thought about the most in my life, it’s orgasms. I study them, it is my primary interest, and it’s interesting because I like to call myself an orgasmnaut. I imagine myself in a silver lamé jumpsuit out at the furthest regions of the most exquisite pleasure, learning how to have different kinds of orgasms and hold incredible amounts of sensation in my body and surrendering into it with a level of heart connection to my lovers, with a level of turn-on with myself, and with a level of connection to what I call Source or GA, that connection to all of us as humanity. So my orgasm is something that I consider to be a very alive part of my life, an evolving, maturing, expanding fireball of pleasure and joy that really fuels so much of what I do.

Overcoming Personal Challenges

Susan Bratton: Now I’m 62, I’ll be 63 next month, I’m having the best orgasms of my life, amazing sex, and at 42, I started on the journey of learning how to have orgasms because I could only have one orgasm using my, 20 years ago, Rabbit vibrator. I almost got divorced because I didn’t want to have sex with my husband because I wasn’t orgasming from intercourse, and I had intercourse with him for 12 years and never had an orgasm and just was really disillusioned by it all. It almost ruined my life and my marriage. I’ve been with him 32 years now, we have sex that keeps getting better, I have 20 different kinds of orgasms, and it’s what I love to teach people to do.

Debunking Myths About Orgasms

The Power of Information

Susan Bratton: There are so many myths and misunderstandings about it that what I love about giving people information about their orgasmic potential is that when I tell them things and they go, “Oh, I didn’t realize that was what it was,” it’s like an instant change. There are so many things where it’s like, I just was working under misinformation, and now that I know what to do, I’m having orgasms. So that’s what’s so nice about it, it’s very rewarding for me and for the person having all the orgasms.

Dr. Diane: There’s so much hope in what you just said because I know we have people listening that are like, “Oh my gosh, she’s in 20 different types of orgasms, I would just like to have one.” There’s so much hope in explaining that. Where does somebody that either has never had an orgasm, or they have this orgasm in one type of way, like you’re describing, and it’s not really that exciting, it’s not very motivating, what do you have to say to that from a standpoint of encouraging people that are in that camp?

Encouraging Orgasmic Exploration

Susan Bratton: When I talk about the 20 kinds of orgasms, the last thing I want to do is have people be discouraged. What I want you to understand is that there are many, many paths to orgasm, what I like to call orgasmic cross-training. Essentially, once you start getting one path to orgasm, you can spin up more paths so that almost everything can make you come after a while. Put aside the discouragement that you’ve had, and let’s talk about orgasmic activation.

Understanding Orgasmic Activation

Three Key Components

Susan Bratton: There are three kinds of orgasms: locations to touch, like your clitoris, your G-spot, your nipples; orgasmic techniques, like erotic hypnosis where you can orgasm from verbal suggestion; and expanded orgasms, which is a clitoral stroking practice that I’ve been practicing for decades that has helped me become orgasmic in a lot of other ways as well. It uses a stroke technique, like a yoga form, to elicit a specific response in this case, an orgasm that is stretched out where time is like taffy, and when you have the orgasm, it’s not just this fleeting little moment, it’s this really long pleasurable orgasmic sensation.

Objects of Desire

Susan Bratton: The third is objects of desire, which could be anything that turns you on, but one of my favorite categories for orgasmic cross-training, learning how to activate all these different parts of your body so that they all come online and become orgasmic, is using sex tools. I don’t think they’re toys because I’m not playing around, Diane, they are tools of pleasure. For the female body, there are eight types of tools that you can use to activate the different parts of your body so that you can have different kinds of orgasms, and lots of stuff makes you come as you get better and better at it.

Tools for Pleasure

Orgasmic Cross-Training Tools

Susan Bratton: Orgasms are a learned skill, there are lots of kinds of them, you can have more and more of them as you activate different areas. One link I want to give you right now is to orgasmic cross-training at mylibidodoc.com, which has the eight tools for the female body and the four tools for the male body that help you achieve all of these different kinds of orgasms. What’s nice is that you can use the tools in solo pleasuring to wake up that mind-body connection, and then when you’re with a partner, it’s much easier to have orgasms with or without the tools because you’ve created the neural pathways.

Neuroscience of Pleasure

Susan Bratton: One of my friends, Dr. Nan Wise, recently wrote a book called Why Good Sex Matters. She’s a neuroscientist and sexual therapist, and she’s done a great amount of work, clinical research, by putting women in MRIs and stimulating different parts of their body and noticing that it lights up different parts of our brain. There are a lot of parts of our body that can be orgasmic. If you’re not currently having orgasms from stimulating certain areas, like I can orgasm from clitoral stimulation but not from penile penetration, or I have never experienced female ejaculation, the other ones can just be added right in over time by stimulating the different parts of your genital system and other erogenous zones like coregasms from your belly, footgasms, oralgasms, throatgasms, nipplegasms, and breastgasms.

Addressing Orgasmic Pressure

Performance Anxiety in Couples

Dr. Diane: I see this happen so much, this orgasmic pressure where there’s a discrepancy between Rosemary Basson’s arousal model and the Masters and Johnson model, but it’s led to this cultural thing where there’s this destination. Partners have this desire to provide pleasure, so with orgasm, there can be pressure for one partner to make sure the other orgasms, and on the receiving end, it can be, “I want to experience it, but I also want the other person to know they did a good job.” It’s pressure, pressure, pressure around orgasm. So how do we get out of that? How do we break down the orgasmic pressure that comes bidirectionally in couples?

Susan Bratton: It’s called performance anxiety, and it affects everyone. The more that you learn to have orgasms, the more confident you get that they’re going to happen. The more that you understand that it’s not something that you affect but instead that it’s something that you allow. All of your orgasms are in there, and they want to come out like a wellspring, a beautiful cool spring bursting from the earth and flowing out. You don’t have to stick a pipe down in the earth and suck orgasms out, you can actually just allow them to come up. I like to call that birthing your orgasm, which is much less about squeezing down and trying and more about opening and allowing.

The Role of Sex Tools

Breaking Free from Misconceptions

Susan Bratton: If I had a nickel for every person who said to me, “Don’t sex toys make it more difficult to orgasm if you don’t have one? Don’t they desensitize you?” I think that goes back to religious, repressed, patriarchal cultural mores that we’re trying to break free of as women. No, in fact, it’s the opposite. The newest toy that I’m working with, from a company called Fun Factory, is called The Sundays. What I like about it is that they are designing this tool to stimulate three different types of nerve endings: Merkel’s discs, Pacinian corpuscles, and Ruffini endings. Part of it is penetrating vibration, part of it is tapping vibration, and part of it is how you use it on the body.

Sophisticated Pleasure Tools

Susan Bratton: Tools are getting very sophisticated. Each one is stimulating different parts of the vulvo-vaginal area, so your brain is going, “Oh, I feel that, do I like that?” You’re laying down these neural pathways, and your body is like, “Oh yeah, I like that, that feels good.” Pretty soon, you’re starting to have orgasms from all kinds of different locations that you’re stimulating in your genital anatomy. The tip of the clitoris has 10,000 nerve endings, it has little arms, big legs, a clitoral body, a urethral sponge, a perineal sponge, back mucosal lining, the cervical area. My friend Jamie Thompson did a good episode about cervical orgasms; go back and listen to that episode of Diane’s show.

A Personal Love-Making Story

Creating a Relaxed Experience

Susan Bratton: Yesterday afternoon, the sunlight was streaming into my bed. I’d gone on a bike ride with my lover, we had taken a shower, and we laid down on the bed right in the swath of the sunshine. I said, “Can you rub some of this THC pain cream on my chest where I got some sunburn because my bikini top was lower than the last one I wore the other day?” “Sure, sweetheart, I can do that.” Then I said, “Could you rub this mother butter into my thighs, my shins, and my arms?” “Sure, baby.” Then I said, “Could you rub this awaken arousal oil on my whole vulva, all the way out to my groin, including my mons, and down almost to my perineum, but don’t go inside, just all on the outside?” “Sure, precious, let me do that for you, how’s that, does it feel good?” “Yes.” Then I said, “Could you use the breast oil now and rub it on my breasts and play with my boobs and my nipples, and could we make out now?” He said, “Of course, I’d love to do that.”

Benefits of Communication

Susan Bratton: Some might say, “He certainly takes direction well, you’re basically just bossing him around,” but my boyfriend would never think about that. The benefits for him are, “She always tells me exactly what she needs to surrender to her pleasure, she always has new ideas for fun, I love that every time we make love, her body wants something different, and she’s so tuned into it that she knows what it is and she just tells me, so I don’t have to guess. I love how relaxing it is to be with her, there’s never any rush, she takes her time and allows herself to get turned on at the pace that her body is telling her that day, and it calms me down too because I don’t have performance anxiety because she doesn’t have performance anxiety.”

Tips for Enhancing Orgasmic Capacity

Solo Pleasuring with Tools

Susan Bratton: A lot of solo pleasuring with toys, I recommend that you use an oral irrigator, a toothbrush, an Instant Pot, you drive a car, use toys. Fill up your pleasure chest with the orgasmic ones you want out of the orgasmic cross-training at mylibidodoc.com or whatever looks good for you. You can double up on toys, triple up on toys, put a little booty plug in, a thruster or a dildo inside, a G-spot wand, add a wand or a vibrator or an air stimulator on your clitoris. Load them up, girls, ain’t no shame in coming super well, super long, super hard, and lots and lots.

Pleasure Protocol Products

Susan Bratton: I have a pleasure protocol that I recommend. There’s an awaken arousal oil that goes on the outer vulva, melts that go inside the vagina, cocoa butter, CBD, and botanicals that melt intravaginally. They also have non-CBD versions, it’s all at pleasureprotocol.com. Those really feel very nice for intercourse, and CBD activates the mind-body connection, which is what you’re going for. The reason your brain is your biggest sex organ is that it processes stimulation into pleasurable sensation. Then there’s sex oil for as much slide and glide as you want when you make love or anytime you’re wanting a good yoni massage.

Full-Body Stimulation

Susan Bratton: Do nipple stimulation while you’re using the tools on your genitals because your mouth, nipples, and breasts are a three-legged stool of your arousal. Your arousal is not just direct stimulation, it’s full-body stimulation. Even if you think, “My breasts aren’t very sensitive, my nipples aren’t very sensitive,” I didn’t have nipple orgasms until I started pleasuring my nipples. Now I can come and come just from my nipples being touched ever so slightly, and it gets your vulva, your internal erectile tissue, the three erectile tissue systems of the vulva, which is as big as all the erectile tissue in the penis, it starts to get the blood flow from the inside out.

The Role of Fantasy

Susan Bratton: Fantasy, think the dirtiest things you can think of, the taboo things you’d never even tell me, and everybody tells me everything. Think those dirty thoughts that turn you up because fantasy is healthy, it gets the juices running, it really relaxes you to get you turned on. Everything that I’ve said today on this show, you’re going to keep getting better and better as you do it. If your fantasies start off pretty tame, give it a year, oh girl, you’re going to be thinking the dirtiest things, and then over time, some of them might actually become realities because you’re just maturing sexually, you’re entering into your orgasm era right now.

Closing Thoughts and Giveaways

Final Encouragement

Dr. Diane: This has been so wonderful. You guys have been scribbling notes down like crazy. Remember, you can download this episode and go back and listen to it a million times, and definitely do that because, as I’ve been saying for this entire year now, whichever guest has the most downloads, the most shares, likes, comments, etc., we’re going to invite them back at the end of 2024 to do a very deep dive on all these topics and more. I certainly want Susan back, I can talk to you all day, Susan.

Sexy Season Promotions

Dr. Diane: It’s a sexy season, and we have a ton of giveaways and promotional things. If you screenshot, rate our podcast, and send it to us, we have a lot of raffles and giveaways. Our 21-day libido jumpstart deep dive, we’re giving away a $1,000 value to one person, so a lot of cool things there, make sure you register. Susan, we’ll have your links for the orgasmic cross-training and the pleasure protocol in the show notes.

Susan Bratton: Let me get you a Sundays for your giveaway, some Foria pleasure protocols for your giveaway. I can also give you a bunch of my programs, my books, and programs to give away if you’d like to have those. I’m thinking maybe Sexual Soulmates, Expand Her Orgasm Tonight, Female Liquid Orgasm, my Steamy Sex Ed Video Collection. Why don’t I give you one of each of those to give away as well?

Dr. Diane: That’s amazing, you guys, sexy season just got sexier and hotter. We have so many giveaways now, so please do rate us, please do review, we’ll get you in this raffle, and now not only do we have a bunch of stuff from me, we have a bunch of stuff from the amazing Susan Bratton to give away as well. You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, and check out our Modern Libido Club for so much more!